Our dev8D 'Lazy Lecturer' prototype

I really should blog more about the event - both lessons I learnt from the content and event structure, but also the experience of being surrounded by actual (higher education, mostly open source/LAMP) geeks. But hey, this will do in the meantime.

3 comments:

I guess that you may well already have heard about the Creative Spaces project, a social media project that links 9 major UK museums and galleries.

I'm working with the Creative Spaces team to help build their community, and thought you may want to have a look at the Beta, and possibly blog about it.

Creative Spaces throws open the collections of: Natural History Museum, The V&A, British Museum, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Royal Armouries, The Wallace Collection and the Imperial War Museum.

The site allows you to search all the collections at once, tag and store items in notebooks and groups, and upload your own images, videos and notes to share creative inspiration with others.

You can access the Beta at: http://bm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/

This is a nonprofit, public sector project, and it’s the first time that national museums have collaborated in this way.

"I think it’s a tough gig for the staff on Creative Spaces - I suspect a lot of the criticism actually relates to the project structures they inherited, not the implementation choices open to them. But the people who write those project bids aren’t around in these museum tech spaces to hear the comments - so who’s left to take responsibility for them?

‘beta’ as final bug fixes is a slightly outdated idea that doesn’t allow for open iterations - having a beta like this is a step closer to an agile model that allows for deep change, not just a thin layer of beta testing that can only poke around on the surface or fix bugs.

I dunno, I’m still thinking through it all. Museum projects need to be more user-centred, and this is both a step forward (even if the geeks have trouble imagining it being useful for other people) and a step backwards (because it’s the same old top-heavy, old-fashioned project structure based around institutional needs)."